The Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa brings together the latest innovations, demos, and industry leaders. While there, Maci Carter visited with Steve Hasselman, a certified Crop Advisor at Agoro Carbon Alliance, to talk about the company and what the Agoro Carbon representatives hope to accomplish at the Farm Progress show.
The voluntary carbon market is comprised of companies that have taken voluntary pledges to be emissions-neutral by a certain date. For most of those companies, it isn’t possible to reach that status without buying offsets from companies like the Agoro Carbon Alliance.
“We are a carbon credit company working in ag in both the row crop and range and pasture settings,” Hasselman explained. “We are kind of the conduit in carbon credit, so we connect the industry that needs to buy these carbon offsets to meet their emissions goals, and we can funnel those funds down to farmers and ranchers that are willing to take on various new ag conservation practices.”
Hasselman and his team work on the ground with farmers guiding them through practice changes such as row crop tillage reductions, cover crop incorporations in pasture and range settings, fertilization, biodiversity – seeding new species into the pasture – or improved grazing practices.
“We help farmers take on these new challenges,” he said. “We have a team of experts, agronomists and ranchers, who have had the experience of incorporating these new changes. We can get funding from the companies that need these voluntary credits to the farmer to help them along.”
He said that the Agoro Carbon Alliance uses a combination of modeling and soil sampling to develop how much carbon is being built in the soil through organic matter.
He advised visiting the website at agorocarbon.com to find more information, resources for the promoted practices, and contact information for a salesman to obtain an estimate of how much money could be gained. “You will have a live person to help you every step of the way and throughout the duration of the contract,” he assured.
He said that there are lots of different companies to help farmers navigate the carbon market, and each has different offerings. “Get with the salespeople and find out what their program entails. Ask them about flexibility, how payouts are made, and what kind of support you will receive along the way. Various publications have been made that compare and contrast different programs, but what we are finding is that there are so many changes that come so quickly, that a lot of that information becomes outdated quickly. So, its best to contact the company and get information right from the source,” he concluded.
